Dream Thing

Chiun caught his eye and gestured down. Remo looked between his feet, and he saw something moving. Hundreds of feet below, it was as if the ocean floor was a squirming, living, undulating entity, rising up to engulf them.

Remo knew. Of course he knew what they were. He was ready for them.

But, man, there was a lot of them. Squid after squid after squid, and their questing tentacles were reaching out for the Masters of Sinanju a full fifty, seventy, ninety feet ahead of their winged mantles, and the folks in the canoes on the surface began to paddle quickly away.

Remo cursed and used his extended fingernail against the questing tentacles, slicing into them with the speed of flashing lightning. Remo saw the sections of the tentacles drifting in the water and for a moment he was terrified that he might see them spontaneously rejoin with their stumps. Sa Mangsang had performed such acts of regeneration …

But these squid did not, and Remo realized it didn’t matter. As he sent one crippled squid after another flitting away, others would come to take his place. The sea was thick with the fleshy giants.

Chiun was more than holding his own. Unlike Remo, all his fingernails were long and honed, and his Knives of Eternity were making mincemeat out of any squid limb that came within reach. The two human beings were floating in a murk of shredded flesh, and still the giant squids crowded around them.

Chiun nodded at the surface, and he and Remo shot up with such speed it confused their attackers. Remo and Chiun sprang onto their canoe.

“Let’s make a run for it,” Remo called.

Chiun was already on the move. With Remo alongside, the old Korean Master stepped across the water’s surface in fast pursuit of the boats of the Faithful of Saraswati.

But Chiun was tired.

The battle under the sea had taken much from him, and propelling his water-sodden robes across the ocean was taxing. He felt a niggling of weariness in his body. It wouldn’t undo him soon, but it was there, and that was bad enough.

He was getting old.

Chiun found his mind wandering. Would he survive this journey? Would he have the opportunity to once again serve tea to his son, the Reigning Master, who must live on?

“Stay frosty!” Remo called, running close at Chiun’s side.

Chiun saw the squid. The water was thickening with them in every direction and they must have been waiting here by the thousands. Of course they were here to protect Sa Mangsang’s precious Faithful, who would amplify his born-again mental powers.

The squid raised themselves out of the sea and snatched at the ankles of the Masters of Sinanju, but came up empty.

“They’ll never get us that way,” Remo declared. “We’re way faster than any octo-reflexes.”

“They’ll try another way,” Chiun declared.

Sure enough, the squid began to flail their giant tentacles out of the water in all directions, without regard to the location of their prey. Remo and Chiun sidestepped the dark, boneless arms, which lost their strength when they were out of their native element.

They stepped aboard the last canoe of the Faithful of Saraswati, and the squid charged at the bottom of the canoe and struck hard.

They came from the water on all sides, rose from the depths at great speed and propelled themselves into the air, grasping with a hundred tentacles at the canoe containing the Masters of Sinanju. Remo and Chiun allowed the tentacles to slip around them, until a second attacking formation flung themselves bodily at the canoe, plowing it up as other squid leaped and pounded it down, and in a heartbeat the canoe was destroyed. The Faithful who were aboard were mashed out of existence by the suicidal collision of the multiton cephalopods, and only Chiun and Remo were still intact. But the density of the airborne squid in that moment was impassable, and they allowed themselves to be borne under the surface, where they skirted the grasping tentacles.

Chiun saw the brilliance in the scheme. The Masters of Sinanju were overwhelmed.

The squid at the periphery encased them in their bodies and more squid came to surround them, crushing and suffocating the squid within and in turn being suffocated and crushed by the next layer of giants. In seconds, a hundred of the creatures had tangled themselves together and embraced each other. A hundred tons of squid meat constricted upon the Masters of Sinanju, who were trapped in the very middle.

Chiun’s breath was forced out of his chest in tiny spurts. The pressure increased. He was encased in the rubber bodies of the squid without a millimeter of room to maneuver. His fingers sliced into the squid flesh and opened up some space, but immediately it was filled again by the growing pressure.

The pressure was killing the inner squid just as surely as it would kill Chiun and Remo, and abruptly Chiun became aware that the inner squid were dead already. The pressure was too much for them. Even though they lived at great depths, they must require slow acclimation to changes in depth.